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We've honestly been considering this for a good long while, looking at it from all angles to try and find a solution which would mutually suit both player and developer, each time coming up empty-handed. For the lazy who aren't interested in my ramblings...TLDR: Due to a vast amount of issues, we've decided to discontinue the BGT version of redspot your all familiar with, hoping to eventually make a python version based heavily on the shortcomings in this one. Thanks for playing! The game is set to go down tomorrow (8-13) at exactly 12:00 A.M. CST

Ok, I suck at these. And now for those who actually care... I'll spare the history lesson, assuming most here will be quite familiar with it. If not, you might have a look at the main RS topic, potentially interesting read for a rainy day. After the release of killingground and arenas, some of us decided to take a well-needed break from playing the game. During this period you'd only see me on when dealing with matters concerning administration. Problem was, the team (myself included) had found other occupying interests. Administrators got together a couple months back in discussion about how the game could be improved, mainly on a professional level and with regard to player relations. Thus, the skype account/email ([email protected]) was born. Myself and some others have been doing our best to keep up with requests and reports, yet it hasn't wavered much from cheater cheater cheater I want to be unbanned heeeeelp! Very very rarely have we gotten anything relating to gameplay and improvement. Shortly after our admin meeting, it became quite evident that overall focus toward RS was ebbing. The unspoken word was that we needed a sort of break. So inevitably, we went our separate ways so to speak. Of course playing RS on occasion, hanging on KG and arenas hear and their, making sure all on-game was well and good and players were as happy as you can be in such an environment. But of course this attitude could only last so long. I had 2 admins I knew I could count on no matter what, the rest seemed to have totally disappeared into the void. It came to the point where nobody was having fun on the game any longer. Their was very, very little push for improvement. Every project needs a driving force, that voice which says I see a future here and this is how it'll look. That was totally lost. Even if I were to conjure up enough determination to do more than take small suggestions, many probably wouldn't even notice. I guess 2 years of nearly constant administration on such a game has it's effects, not to mention the systems which would provide balance for the game required quite a bit of code. Myself nor Sam could really find it in us to work on RS as much as a high-volume game would demand, much less a complete overhaul in mechanics. The game was created to satisfy a circle of friends, thus many crucial elements of a successful project were overlooked, the most noteworthy being a lack of communication with our players and their suggestions. Most of the word we got came from beta members and those closely affiliated with the project. Updates usually came with a wealth of new features, but god offal documentation which made it quite difficult for newbies.At the beginning of my time in the dev team we had all attempted to remedy this, but most of the ways were set in stone making it far more practical to start from scratch at some later point. The BGT version of RS certainly had it's time though, I know myself and many others had quite a bit of fun playing what many would consider the best FPS of it's time. There's many aspects I know I'll miss, specifically arenas and KG.

So where does this leave us you might ask?

Although other projects seem far more appealing at the moment, we have plans to release a python version of RS at some point. This one'll be rewritten from scratch, hopefully learning from past mistakes and finally doing away with the lag and limited nature of BGT. So far, progress has been made in the way of a complete python game engine and template. My hope is that we'll be able to create another version of RS, paying heed to balance and most of the shortcomings of this version. Or at least one can hope, right? So thank you guys for the good fights, suggestions, lack of boredom, understanding, and most of all hanging around. I hope to see you all on that new game in the distant future. Let's hope we can make it better and learn from our previous mistakes. So long, and thanks again.

It's so good you are moving to Pithon, I've bin wanting to play this game, but can't due to windows Defender. Do you plan to create an iOS and Mac version of this game, I think it should also be multiplatform.

Just wondering, because on iOS there are not very much FPS games out there.

This is definitely a good thing. I used to be a beta member, and also Sam Carter and Alec are close friends of mine. Rs has definitely caused a lot of stress amongst the three of them, and it's glad to finally see it all stop. So plus 1 for post 1.

@10Can you perhaps describe in greater detail why arenas should be removed? Personally I was leaning toward more fights where things were totally equal and it was just a constant kill fest. Your the first to voice any complaint, so I'd be greatly interested to hear some reasoning.

I honestly was going to not respond to this, but well, things change.I'm personally glad to see this step. RS always had balancing issues, not to mention it's community. every time an update came, it fixed 1 balance issue, and 3 new issues came out. it was a constant battle that would never end, and it was pretty apparent that you guys have lost interest in the game. I was one of the ones who suggested in another topic, a while back, to possibly close it. you've never charged for it, it was never paid or anything alike. we've all had our shares of fun on the thing. I hope to see new and exciting projects in the near future, and hopefully we have all learned from redspot in our own ways, whether that be playing, administrating, coding, balancing, teaming, or whatever else. again, all the best.

Python is so amazing, million times better than bgt. We will never see the lag again in that new game. And yeah, I hope the game right now is quite balanced in terms of teams, bases and members, I hope to see new features, weapons, and lots and lots of new people there heartily waiting for the new python-based version! And carter thanks for the above link dude

Hopefully the new Red Spot does away with bases (outside of a dedicated match mode of "Destroy the Enemy base). Honestly, I was sort of getting the feeling after a while, with every update resulting in a rain of complaints because people would break the game wide open (spamming bought item grabbers within bases, bases on fences, stacking shield boosters), that motivation to code some more was not going to be worth it. So option B, start all over seems like the stressless choice to make at this point. And you know, a chance to actually dedicate an FPS with actual game events, while having the free for all as a waiting/practice kill fest between matches. (Again, still awkward that the co-op zombie killer game, Swamp, is the only one with a functional game pvp mode).

Good luck on the new project, and for trying out something fun for the team.

I honestly think BGT is a huge part to play in all of this, but I hope you all don't just blame this on BGT and open up and do the same things that happened with Redspot. Because BGT was a problem in terms of mechanics and lag, but there were issues in how everything else worked.1. Bugs weren't fixed until they bothered Sam himself, which really was the problem. It was much more cool to add cameras and guns and guns and guns and guns and guns and guns and guns and weapons and guns and guns and did I say guns? Each new thing that came out had problems, but sam would just be like yeah I know robots can zip through walls and projectiles lag people, but hey guns are here, guns are there, guns are everywhere guns guns guns new weapons and you can stun people with cameras so please don't mind the bugs. But these were huge game-changing bugs. Sam trashed an entire team of people who played together simply because OP then promptly joined a team himself.2. given the last bit of my prior point, there's not any separation of admin vs player, and every player thought every admin was cheating. It's really hard to play as a player while also enforcing rules, and most of the admins really didn't care enough to try that. blaze just wanted to ban anyone that went AFK and Q was to busy being god and only arriving for his friends. They both also did do good things that needed done, but the team was such that it really wasn't expected that anything would happen.3. I can't stress documentation which Carter pointed out enough. I remember the big huge update that everyone had their panties in a bunch over, and there was this huge release which was broken for most people, then excitement, then confusion as everyone tried to get to grips with the documentation. Docs were promised to be written by Nakon who also promised to do all kinds of other stuff, which really just didn't happen, but Sam and sam's friends didn't need documentation since anyone who spoke to him for 30 seconds was automagically on the beta team and could figure things out prior to launch. But apart from that, all kinds of items (food coolers anyone?) were not intuitive and even the last time I played, there was literally no docs on how to use them and after they'd been out for months people were still asking. there wasn't a way to get help on each item (and when that was suggested it was just to much work).

When you sit down to write a game, it has to be something you put some thought into designing and working out, and if your first design fails as with any product you need to be willing to reiterate. BGT is a huge problem for Redspot, but honestly if there had been any interest in any kind of cleanup, it could have been fixed up. Perhaps not perfectly, but enough that it would be playable. Instead, priority was given to any new items and the numerous bugs were just sort of left out of mind and ignored. And as the code grows, it becomes harder and harder to do any kind of work on any of the core systems. I specifically remember all of the issues with HRTF (step one unit to the right facing something and it just jumps straight to your left speaker) and all the rotation issues, which are an issue for so many audio games because they use that terrible rotation code which would make anyone past any moderately complex math cry tears of shame, and yet there was no interest in taking the time to do that right, as long as it mostly worked. The distance formula was all kinds of crazy (it did each leg of distance differently), and changing that was met with a god awful amount of resistance strictly because no matter how much proof or evidence or explaination, it just didn't make sense, and thus distances were really confusing.

I think Redspot has been as wildly popular as it has simply because No other developer has had absurd amounts of time and wanted to start off their development career downloading and torretnting absurd amounts of sound libraries, which they could eventually later repurchase with the thousands of dollars raked in by collecting some poor sap's SSI checks for a get out of death free card on survive the absurd. Sam was well placed to provide people with an FPS game that was held together by bubble gum, hope and prayers to the BGT gods. The popularity of the game backs up my idea that you can give the blind community the option of nothing or shit on a stick, and they'll happily take shit on a stick for lack of anything better. People were willing to overlook the amazing amount of bugs, admin abuse and all the other issues simply because Redspot was the only thing out there. I'd like to say I'm sad, but hopefully we can move on from this and someone can step up and do something better.

17: Your information is mostly valid but quite out of date, which is understandable given you haven't been involved with rs in a while. Admin Vs Player is not nearly as much of an issue anymore seeing as over the last few months there was a dramatic shift away from player and toward admin with the skype account, more commands, and admins being generally less interested in playing. And sorry, but I have to defend myself for a second, blaze banned anyone who went AFK? I'm one of the most conservative admins in this community, so much so that players actually get irritated at me for *not* taking action when I feel it is unjust. /help was also added for every item, and since then there haven't been any noticeable difficulties with people understanding how stuff works.The main issue by the end of it all was that not enough admins or devs cared enough to keep the boiler stoked and the train crawling along, and Sam in particular has this irritating tendency to decide when redspot needs to be worked on separate from what actually needs doing, as you said. Eventually Carter said he wasn't working on it if Sam wasn't willing to commit, Sam said he was done without Carter, and finally the remains of the admin team saw the pointlessness in continuing without the devs. Honestly, if whatever comes after this has the same sort of development issues, I won't be jumping on that wagon. The level of attentiveness to projects needs to go way up. In other words, when players say there's an issue, it should be at least looked into and there should be some sort of resolution in a few days at most. I'm rambling, but point is redspot was a nice idea, but also one big mistake/learning experience. I like Sam, but there are some things he needs to realize for this to work the next time. Hopefully redspot in python reflects that.

Hello,It's been a while since I've posted anything related to gaming on this forum; the topics just haven't been as interesting. However, let me sum up some of my recommendations and observationsFirst, while the concept was great, it lacked serious realistic combat maneuvers. You could easily aim downward to shoot at someone, but couldn't aim upward without jumping. This makes it very difficult, if not outright impossible to track an opponent. Also, defense is quite poor; the only real effective maneuvers available to players were jumping and hitting the backspace key to drop to the ground, but that only lasts a second and doesn't allow you to roll while doing so. This makes you a sitting duck for players who simply have to aim down and shoot you, since you're also not allowed to attack from a grounded position. Totally realistic, I'm sure the Marines would agree.Second, the imbalances were problematic to say the least. As was mentioned a number of times, the revolvers were more powerful than some of the rifles, which doesn't make much sense, since rifles typically have a much longer range and power than revolvers. The bases also made enemies nearly invincible, since they could continuously stock up on ammo, shields, and health. The store was also an issue, since it was difficult to find and often didn't appear on the map at all. Additionally, items shouldn't have to be delivered to players who aren't purchasing things from a store not associated with a base. If I wanted to buy ammo for my M4A1 rifle, I shouldn't have to type in coordinates and have my ammo potentially snatched by players nearby. If the quantity is too large to carry, I should have a drone follow me and possibly deliver it to me directly.Finally, updates and improvements were rare. When players made suggestions, they were either ignored, or set aside due to the copious amount of bugs the developers had to address. This makes the game less enjoyable, since key issues such as the ones I listed above would never be dealt with. I have to say that at the beginning, things seemed to be going right; I was one of the first beta testers and even compiled a suggestions list. Since the ddropbox updates became less frequent, these suggestions weren't updated. So, development lagged behind considerably as a result. I hope these suggestions will help motivate the developers to put effort into this project and have as much fun improving it as the players do participating in it.

20: I'm not really interested in having a falsified argument with you here. Suffice it to say that the particular situation of which you speak came about because you decided that it would be entertaining, amusing, something, to log in and start telling people you cheated and begging the admins to ban you. I can't imagine what drugs you were on that day, but that's akin to terrorism since you were scaring players into thinking a horrible cheater was on the loose. I remember quite clearly telling you that if you were kidding to stop doing it because you were scaring people, and if you were serious that I would ban everyone who had cheated and confiscate any cheated items. Please don't try twisting facts. I'll gladly post logs of public chat that day, though perhaps privately since it's quite irrelevant to the topic.21: See, that's the exact issue. A lot of those things were discussed but never done, or partially finished and left to collect dust in the beta folder where it sits to this day. Carter only came on recently, and since then a lot of bugs and things have been fixed. Sam does stuff too of course, but it's like he just decides, today I'm going to work on redspot, because that sounds like a fun passtime, rather than recognizing that sometimes what he wants to do is secondary to what he needs to do. That's just not the way to get things accomplished. Shooting up very much needed to be a thing, and diving was only ever useful for avoiding base machine guns which is dumb. I agree that many of the weapon stats were very much thrown together as we were more concerned with A, getting out as many as possible, and b, making them sound cool. Bitcoins were deflated and stuff to help with the base thing, but I'm honestly starting to agree with those who want to go the more traditional mainstream route and have matches and such. After all, we're starting over. Perfect time to rethink mechanics, it's the best way to prevent the next SCM, and it would be a lot more pickup and play even with teamplay. You do know about /storehint right? That made the store fairly easy to find, and there has never been a time when the store didn't spawn somewhere in the lower left half of bf.

Hi.Sounds great. I think moving to Python will improve things a lot.Sorry to say, but I think shutting down the game for a while will stop a lot of complaining here on the forum.

Best regards SLJ.If you like the post, then please give it a thumps up.Feel free to contact me privately if you have something in mind. If you do so, then please send me a mail instead of using the private message on the forum, since I don't check those very often.Happy gaming... :D

I really really enjoyed this gaame, but it did have some issues. also I think there should be a much better moderation because players were threatening to rape each other in the arenas, just as an example. for example I was on the game a few days ago and a player repeated, I'm ashamed to write it, nigger, 4 times in one chat message. this is unacceptable behavior and the devs and admins made know action to stop it. this is one of the reasons why I didn't like the game very much. the killing ground at certain times could be fun, but you would have very powerful people on it, I had been one at some points, and it became very unfair for the other players, for example there have been players on the kg with almost quadrouple the amout of kills than the actualy amount of players online, etc etc. the arenas were ok, but I think the game was extremely unballanced overall. I was one of scm's main enemies, except for aa few players, but they would just spam kill players over and over and not leave any room for new players coming in. this is I believe why the player base began to shrink. in 0.8 it was good, because more or less everyone had the same weapons and such. and good luck with the python version of the game.